The Tarka rapid expansion has paid off, and my economy roughly quadrupled in size over the span of our game time yesterday. Now the game comes down to whether or not the Liir tech advantage can stop the Tarka powerhouse.

Bursters proved to be a superweapon, blasting apart even dreadnoughts when we could get close to them. Blue countered with emitters, and cruiser fleets quickly proved useless! I hurriedly teched to dreadnoughts and grabbed HEAP weapons to fill medium slots. Mass Shotguns for heavies, or still some bursters.

Then Blue brought out the battlecruisers. Holy hell those things are terrifying! Covered head to toe with phasers and positron beams, they started picking apart my dreads. Doesn't look like dreadnoughts can't go toe-to-toe with equal CP of battlecruisers. I might have to transition back to cruiser based fleets! We shall see!

Yup, game is over. Gotta hand it to Blue though, he put up a very solid defense with psychic shenanigans.

My early expansion strategy paid off, and pretty soon my economy was snowballing out of control. The tech lead of the Liir soon turned into a tech deficit. By the end of the game I had pretty much every tech a Tarka player could possibly want. Adamantium, lvl2 reflective, goop-spam, neutronium rounds, even siege drivers which were ready to join the fray.

That said, Blue still had Battlecruisers with meson beams, which are terrifying. I soon found that dreadnoughts weren't trading too favorably with the BCs. While I worked on the game-ending techs, I resorted to a series of hit-and-runs with suicide fleets. Not very exciting, but it worked. With new warp-engines, my kamikaze fleets could fly 12 lightyears per turn, meaning that even my random colonies were only 1-2 turns from the fish homeworlds. So I threw lots of suicide assault shuttle ships, armed with bursters, at Blue's planets and just killed whatever I could. The fleets would die to the last, but I'd wipe all the infrastructure and most of the population from key worlds.

Then I threw like 12 fleets at him. The BCs and fear were scary, but my empire was simply too large. I could build another 100-CP fleet in about 6 turns (less with overharvest) from each of my 4 forge systems, so an entire armada could be replenished in about 20 turns.

What was interesting to note is that it was the humble Tarkasian cruiser which really won the day at the end. Dreadnoughts did not seem worth it, and I did not get to Leviathans. At the end of the game it was very simple "Hunter Killer" cruisers. Hammerhead, armor, warp antimatter, with adamantium, reflective, and goop spam, covered in Bursters and HEAP drivers. I found the "pursue" option to be key for Bursters. Put your ships on pursue, select bursters as your primary weapon, and they detonate at the perfect spot (literally right on the enemy ship.) They tore dreadnoughts to pieces very quickly, and did decent work on BCs. I think the size of dreads means that about half of each burst hits them. Combine this with the HEAP rounds getting that pesky armor out of the way, and the hull damage piles up. Mass-shotguns didn't impress me though. Even at super close range they felt very underwhelming, and the damage numbers post-combat always showed them dealing a very small amount of damage.

A very fun game overall. I have no idea what I would have been able to do if I didn't control an economy probably 4-5 times bigger than Blue's. I was able to grab a huge chunk of the galaxy, relying on lvl1 weapons and boarding pod spam at the start to hold off Blue's tech advantage.

One interesting thing I noticed was how decently phasers played into the end game. I am not sure if this is a bug or not, but even in the last few fights, the post-battle numbers were showing phasers doing damage roughly equal to meson beams. And this is against my ships packing every defensive tech possible. Does that sound right at all? In game it looked like it was the mesons doing all the work, and I could see them just cut through all the armor no matter how fast I spammed the goop button. But then at the end of a battle, the numbers would be roughly equal! Are the phasers still hitting that hard? Or might this be a bug?

Anyway, a fun game. Sadly my sots time will have to be cut down soon as the school year starts back up (which for me means work starts up in earnest again too), but I am always up for multiplayer games with people!

duckbird wrote:One interesting thing I noticed was how decently phasers played into the end game. I am not sure if this is a bug or not, but even in the last few fights, the post-battle numbers were showing phasers doing damage roughly equal to meson beams. And this is against my ships packing every defensive tech possible. Does that sound right at all? In game it looked like it was the mesons doing all the work, and I could see them just cut through all the armor no matter how fast I spammed the goop button. But then at the end of a battle, the numbers would be roughly equal! Are the phasers still hitting that hard? Or might this be a bug?

Beam weapons have the ability if they hit the same spot they ignore the blue layer for the 2nd to 4th damage tick.Also Phaser are a medium weapon while meson beams are a heavy beam weapon.In raw damage output they are nearly equal (read: 1 meson does roughly the same damage on a (moving) target as 2 phaser on a unmoving target).Liir have traditionally more smaller then larger mounts, so their BC/BS and als DNs field more Medium mounts then large ones.Thats the reason you have seen more phaser damage.Hope that helped.

Still had hoped for more battle reports and some screenshots Perhaps next time ^_^

back from vacation and i can only echo what duck said, the game was intense and fun even though i never made any ground

as for your question abour how the phasors did equal dmg to the meson beams in late game:

simple answer: the Battlecruiser has a ton of medium mounts, 8 of them alone forward facing, and 4 more on the sides, let aloone the mounts on the back.that goes versus 3 heavy mounts with meson beams.

so it has roughly 3 times the firepower in medium mounts than it has in large mounts, in other words, phasors did roughly halfe as good as mesons (counting 2 medium versus 1 large).they really sucked ! if i had even fusion cannons instead, i would have delt wayyy more dmg.in my experience the medium mount DMG from the BC's is roughly double the heavy mounts dmg if fusion cannons are in play.

(i have had now 5 games with heavy BC experience, never went the phasor route before but they didnt pay off in lategame)

I guess it makes sense about the phasers, but in battle it just looks like the Mesons are doing all the work. I see the phasers hit my dreads, and it's just "plink plink plink", and very little damage. Then the Meson beams just burn through the entire armor block almost instantly. Looked to be such a discrepancy!

I guess the phasers can do much more damage once the armor is burned out?